Vegan New York, part one: shoes!!!

Even though it's not a good thing to be jealous, I definitely envy the vegans in New York. I will write a separate post about the vegan food options in NYC, which are plenty!

I have to admit that stopping to wear leather or suede shoes wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I knew very well that that's the right thing to do, I wasn’t at all interested in the argument that it's just a by-product of the meat production, so as long as people eat meat, it would be unwise not to use the skin of the animals. Well, I'm not really interested in any by-products of mass murder.

My first non-leather shoes came probably from h&m or deichmann, they seemed to fulfill all the criteria: made of vegan materials, inexpensive, easy to find. Unfortunately I soon discovered that most of them were not comfortable and of really poor quality.. I still shop high-street brands for shoes, you can from time to time find great stuff, you just have to learn to avoid the cheap, terribly-smelling plastic crap ;) Then there's e-bay, where you can always find great deals, if you're willing to take a bit of risk which always comes with online shoe shopping. But none of these options come close to the discovery I made during my visit to New York last month: Moo Shoes!

Moo Shoes is a fantastic vegan shop in the Lower East Side. They have an amazing selection of beautiful (yes!) vegan sandals, heels, wedges, boots, sneakers, you name it. The price range is also quite friendly, the ones I looked at were between 50 and 200$. Yes, that's more than H&M, but the quality is beyond any comparison. I am a person who loves to walk and who walks a lot every day. At the same time I like nice shoes that are not exactly the same kind that everyone in the street is wearing at a given moment. Well, Moo Shoes has it all! In fact it has more than that - they also sell some clothing, vegan books and magazines, bags.. You can see yourself at their homepage:

http://www.mooshoes.com/

Still, they do even more. At the shop's homepage you can find a list of ideas how to get involved in animal rights issues. The projects include for example volunteering at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary or (obviously;) going vegan. Here's the link:

http://www.mooshoes.com/getactive

The only regret you might have after visiting Moo Shoes (if you're from my side of the big water, of course;) is that you really wish we had a store like that in Europe. I don't even necessarily mean Brussels, but London would be nice. It's a bit easier to take a shopping trip from Brussels to London than to New York ;)

Last but not least, I have to mention the extremely friendly staff at the shop. That includes the humans and the resident cats, who definitely give you the impression that in fact it's them running the place. Every once in a while they wake up from their naps at the counter, just to make sure that the business is going as it should.